


Just a Delivery

by Lovelymayor



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 19:48:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10838184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lovelymayor/pseuds/Lovelymayor





	Just a Delivery

Where am I going this time? Equentin thought, briefly picturing the biomes throughout the city. Somehow, despite the location of the pizzeria at which he worked, he often found himself driving his scooter through snow, through throbbing heat, or through the rain-slick roads of the Rainforest district, desperately hoping he wouldn’t drive off into one of the bottomless gorges. To his surprise, he saw the address as Acacia street. It was a thoroughfare in Savannah Central, and not far at all from Pizza Paddock.

As the rich, large salmon-lovers with a cheese stuffed crust came out of the oven, Equentin scrunched up his nose at the peculiar smell of baked fish, his herbivore sensibilities offended by the meat. But a job was a job, and he was around bug or tofu covered pies daily. Comparatively, he supposed this wasn’t as bad. He stood there waiting for the pizza to be placed carefully into a box with the exaggerated Pizza Paddock logo.

“Hey Colt, this one is for a big shot customer, so you’d better be careful!” His coworker, a spunky feline girl about his age.

“I thought the address looked familiar…” Equentin nodded, peering down at the label on the box.

“Yup!” His coworker reached up slapped him on the back. “But hey, I’m jealous! I bet there’s gonna be a huge tip involved.

Equentin nodded absently, trying to remember who lived at that address. The name on the label was a ‘SARCHUS’, and that didn’t ring a bell. He tried to think of what species the name belonged to so that he could maybe picture a face. Nothing worked. Whoever it was, he didn’t remember based on the information he had. There wasn’t any time to ask his coworker about it further – this was a rush order. He gave his cat coworker a nod and slid the pizza into the heat-protective delivery bag he was holding.

The racket of passing cars greeted Equentin as he pushed open the door with his back and walked to his scooter, parked on the street in an “employees only” space. He clipped the pizza bag onto the space behind the seat and timidly checked the front for a parking ticket. Despite his car being in the safe zone, he was always nervous after hearing that, recently, a plague of parking tickets had appeared on cars parked for mere seconds longer than their meter had allowed. It sounded to him like the ZPD liked to ticket first and ask questions later.

Mounting the comfortable scooter seat, Equentin pressed his hooves into the holsters waiting attached to the handles. Just about everything he did needed a special tool designed for his hooves, and though he had grown up using them, they never seemed to make life as easy as it seemed for other mammals. The comfortable hum of his small cylinder engine kicked him into gear as he shifted into his delivery mode mentality. It would only take a few minutes to get to the address, even with traffic. His scooter afforded him the luxury of weaving through rush hour traffic.

Carefully choosing the lanes meant for vehicles of his size, Equentin neared the vast, gleaming diamond of a building on Acacia. The skyscraper lit his darkened memories like a lamp suddenly switched on. He had been here just once before, several months ago. There, he had delivered a pizza to an embattled woman who seemed, at the time, on the verge of a breakdown. Later, he found out she was the candidate for mayor at the time. She had lost since then. He wondered briefly how she was doing as he pulled into the protected underground parking area. The mail and delivery parking was situated right next to a large black sedan with tinted windows, and a polar bear in a security uniform eyed Equentin up and down as he hurried to unhook his pizza from the back of the scooter.

There was no way the pizza would have gotten cold in the ten minutes it had taken him to arrive, but he remembered all the security checkpoints he would have to go through. First, the metal detector and a crew of jackals or wolves or whatever they were. Satisfied that he wasn’t carrying a gun along with the food, he was sent upstairs via an elevator that counted up the floors until it hit fifty. The penthouse.

Outside the elevator, an elegant lobby waited. Piped in music of the classical variety tickled his ears, and his hooves clicked on the marble. A large, solid looking wooden door stood in front of him, the only door on the floor. In front of it, an easy chair occupied by a mammal reading a newspaper. He stood up immediately to greet Equentin.

“Evening. Pizza Paddock?” The broad-chested hyena growled in his low voice. He stared at him behind dark glasses, obscuring the position of his eyes. He judged his every motion. When Equentin examined his face, he found scars and the subtle markers of middle age.

Equentin stammered, surprised that the hyena was as tall as he was.

“I, uh, um, y-yeah, pizza…” He held up the bag as if a peace offering.

“I ordered it for her, so go ahead and take it in.” The hyena lowered his glasses, cold eyes staring out at the delivery horse. “And no funny business.”

The hyena turned and opened the door for him, which lead to another small passageway with a few coats hanging, and another door. Equentin approached it and rang the bell.

It seemed like a full minute before a sleepy wolf answered the door. She rubbed her eyes and smiled wearily up at the horse, her nose already sniffing at what he had brought her. He opened up the flap on the bag and smiled back, trying not to show too much enthusiasm. He was nervous and he could feel it getting in the way of his words. This was the wolf who he had met before. She had given him an enormous tip, and indeed, she was the former mayoral candidate for the city of Zootopia.

Her name was Aurelia Canidae, and she seemed half-surprised by his arrival.

“Oh, I suppose Andrea ordered dinner? That was kind of her…”

Equentin looked at the label on the box. “Sarchus?”

“Oh yes. My bodyguard, just outside. I’ve been working on bills all evening, so dinner completely slipped my mind.”

That word, slipped, drew the delivery horse’s attention to something. Canidae’s outfit. She was wearing a slip, one meant for the bedroom. The material was light blue, diaphanous, and affixed with a few ribbons down the breast. As his eyes lingered, he could make out the shape of her curves just below the fabric. He quickly drew his eyes upwards to meet hers.

He searched for something kind to say, something understanding. Something normal. “Oh, haha, well you look great, ma’am.” Oops. Ma’am? Miss? From what he could tell, she was older. But maybe an older woman would hate being called ma’am…

Canidae smiled enigmatically, peeking up at the nervous horse as he held the piping hot pizza in his heat-resistant hoof, completely oblivious to the warmth.

“Thank you,” she replied, awkwardly, reaching up to brush her hair behind her ear while her other ear flicked. Beneath the dress, Equentin could sense her hips shift. She stared curiously at him as if lost in the intricacies of his arrival here and what it all meant. Or maybe she was just sizing him up.

“What is it, by the way?”

“It’s a fish-lover’s deluxe.” He explained, her box suspended in his hoof.

At that, the wolf’s eyes lit up. She seemed starving, primed to pounce, but she stopped herself. Good girls didn’t get to eat their pie, and she must have known that.

“Goodness, it’s big! I do hope I can fit it all.” She paused, frowning as if inadvertently disgusted with what she had said. “Well, I’m in no position to pay you at the moment. Why don’t you come inside my little place and allow me to fetch my purse?” With that, she turned. Her paw left the door as she walked further inside her apartment. Equentin followed after.

He hadn’t got as much of a chance to enjoy the view last time, and now his breath was taken by it. The sun sank like the yolk of an egg down below the horizon, as the city of Zootopia beneath became cast in shadows. Lights clicked on like raindrops all throughout the various buildings he could see. As he walked behind Canidae, he nearly tripped over a small chair in the foyer, skirting around it at the last second and getting closer to the wolf as she walked.

There was so much to look at, but Equentin has his share of social difficulties. As a result, he didn’t take much time to glance at the sleek modern furniture, the abundance of white and cream and taupe. The sofa strewn with pillows, the coffee table similarly buried under sheets of paper, and the TV blaring the evening news. No, his eyes affixed onto the swishing of the wolf’s tail and before long he realized that what he was watching had perhaps been the sway of her ample posterior just beneath her slip dress.

Canidae reached a large open kitchen area with a great island surrounded by bar chairs. She gestured for Equentin to stop there and skirted the island to the inside, near the dual ovens and the refrigerator and all the other built in appliances, flush with the fall. A pink Preyda purse sat there on the edge of the counter, and she leaned over as she fished through it, her elbows resting flat on the surface in front of her. The act completely exposed herself, one strap of the slip even falling off her shoulder as her décolletage showed quite suddenly.

“O-oh, ma’am,” Equentin stammered, “if you want to pay another time, I’d be happy to come—“

“No, no. It’s here somewhere. I don’t often carry cash, you see. The bills always fold up, get crumpled, lost… I prefer to grip something hard, and flexible enough to fit my needs.”

As Equentin pondered what she meant by that, he saw her fish a credit card out of the purse. In one motion, she pulled her strap back up to her shoulder and handed him the card.

“Forgive me for all the trouble.” She apologized, yawning wide with only the back of her paw to cover her graceful lupine mouth. “I’m sure you have to rush to please other customers, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His eyes found their way down her throat, examining her velvety tongue. Then, a moment later, she closed her mouth, leaving the rest to his imagination. Wanting to avoid looking at her bod again, he glanced around the apartment. “What a huge…” His thoughts straying. “Place you have here.”

Canidae waved her paw dismissively. “Oh, it’s nothing important. Here, why don’t you slide my card in that slot there.” Her next gesture reminded him of the small card payment plugin on his cell phone. “Would you like a glass of water? You look so thirsty.”

Equentin grunted under his breath. Maybe he was a little thirsty, but it would feel so awkward to sit there sampling from her tap. Before he had the opportunity to turn her down, Canidae was already leaning over the sink with a glass, her paw moving out to touch the faucet, activating it. The effect was immediate, a sharp roaring spray of water bursting from the faucet against Canidae, pulsing onto her and soaking her thoroughly. She yelped, jumping back, but it wasn’t enough.

“Goodness! I’m terribly sorry!” Canidae began apologizing. “The faucet’s in need of repair and I completely forget. I-I’m soaked!” She tried to laugh it off, to deflect it, but her embarrassment was obvious.

Equentin had somehow managed to remain completely dry. The pizza, luckily, had also escaped the flood. It was still sitting on the counter where he had placed it moments before. He was as startled as she was, jumping back. He couldn’t avoid looking at her, at least to see if she was okay. There she was, a city councilwoman, in a drenched slip that clung to her body, outlining her as if she were naked. The curve of her chest, her nipples, her thighs and the pillowy softness of her midsection. His eyes walked up and down her form before he caught himself and turned away.

Canidae’s ears blushed. “Oh, goodness, perhaps I should disrobe. I’m so sorry about all this. Go ahead and run my card and I’ll be right back.” She hurried out of the kitchen, dripping water and wetter than any mammal Equentin could recall seeing in some time.

Left alone, he did what he could. He slid Canidae’s card and set it aside to wait for her to tip him.

He waited.

He took a seat at one of the chairs up against the kitchen island.

He drummed his hoof against the counter.

Then, “Oh, Mr. Pizza Delivery Horse! If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I convince you to come here for a moment? I’m in the back, just follow my voice!”

Equentin hesitated for a moment before he decided kindness would win the day. He trotted toward Canidae’s bedroom purposefully, stopping short only when he heard the sounds of struggle coming from beyond the cracked door.

“I give up…” Canidae mumbled to herself just as he entered. She was standing there in her soaking slip, frowning at what appeared to be the doors to a closet. “Oh!” Noticing him now, she was all smiles. “Look here, the entry into my boudoir is jammed. Could you be a dear and give it a pull?”

Equentin swallowed and nodded. He really did want to help. The wolf’s eyes look so tired, and her mannerisms were the frazzled actions of someone who hadn’t had good rest in a while. Were these “bedroom eyes?”

“You want me to pull your knob here?” He offered, placing a hoof there.

Canidae chuckled. “Oh, you’re just full of youthful ideas. Yes, unless you’ve got one I can pull that I don’t know about.”

He didn’t quite get the joke. Determined, Equentin grabbed the knob and yanked. He felt a bit of resistance, then the doors popped open unexpectedly sending him flying backward. Another yelp sounded as he collapsed against Canidae, pushing her back and falling with her onto her four-poster bed. The mattress, plush as a panda bear, half-engulfed them. The silky, translucent curtains parted on either side of the two.

“What the hell is going on here?!”

Andrea, the hyena from minutes prior, marched up to the bed and grabbed Equentin by the collar of his pizza-branded polo shirt. Her grip was a steel vice, and it was all he could do to neigh and whinny in alarm, hooves flailing as he was returned to a standing position. He felt like a doll in her paws.

“I’m not doing anything! I was just pulling on her—“

“You were what?” Andrea spit, fuming.

Canidae sat up on the bed, the cold having hardened her nipples into perfect outlines under her slip. Even Andrea noticed.

“Please, don’t! He helped me open the closet so I could get a change of clothes.”

“Why are you wet?” Andrea spoke much more softly when she spoke to Canidae. She took a step forward, aiming to put herself between the colt and the wolf. She was a bodyguard, so obviously being this protective was part of her job. But even Equentin thought it was a bit much when she sat down on the bed next to Canidae and cooed, “There, there, sweetie, I won’t let him hurt you.”

“But he!” Candiae began to protest.

“Shhh. It’s over now.” She even pet the space between the wolf’s ears in an effort to placate her. It was working, or at least it was keeping her quiet. “Now, colt. Go get your stuff and make trails. You can write whatever you want in the tip section, alright? Just don’t go blabbing that you were in Councilwoman Canidae’s bedroom, or…” Andrea grinned, her teeth baring, “I’ll order again and request they send you. You might not make it back next time.”

Equentin was already backing out of the room. He turned just after seeing Andrea lift Canidae to her feet and shepherd her to the closet, likely to get her dried and dressed. He felt the guilt of whatever misunderstanding had caused her bodyguard to suspect him of foul play. And the guilt that the pizza might be cold by now. On the way back toward the foyer, he stopped by the kitchen to grab his cellphone. He calculated an average tip, not wanting to take more than he deserved.

As he found his way out the front door, thought that it might be nice to be requested next time.

Ms. Canidae was nice enough.


End file.
